Into the Water 7 страница

I finished the drink and poured another. I enjoyed the physical sensation, the warmth spreading from my stomach into my chest, my blood heating up, my whole body loosening, that afternoon’s misery ebbing away.

I went into the living room and looked out at the river, a slick black snake running underneath the house. It was surprising to me, how suddenly I could see what I hadn’t before – that the problem of me was not insurmountable at all. I had a sudden moment of clarity: I didn’t have to be fixed, I could be fluid. Like the river. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so difficult, after all. Wasn’t it possible, to starve myself, to move more (in secret, when no one was watching)? To be transformed, caterpillar into butterfly, to become a different person, unrecognizable, so that the ugly, bleeding girl would be forgotten? I would be made new.

I went back to the kitchen to get some more to drink.

I heard footsteps upstairs, padding along the landing and then coming down the stairs. I slipped back into the living room, turned off the lamp and crouched in the darkness on the window seat, my feet pulled up beneath me.

I saw him go into the kitchen, heard him opening the fridge – no, the freezer, I could hear him cracking ice out of the trays. I heard the glug of liquid and then I saw him as he walked past. And then he stopped. And took a step back.

‘Julia? Is that you? ’

I didn’t say anything, didn’t breathe. I didn’t want to see anyone – I certainly didn’t want to see him – but he was fumbling for the light switch, and then the lights came on and there he stood, in boxer shorts and nothing else, his skin a deep tan, his shoulders wide, body tapering to a tight waist, the fuzz on his stomach leading down into his shorts. He smiled at me.

‘Are you OK? ’ he asked. As he stepped closer I could see that his eyes looked a little glazed, his grin stupider, lazier than usual. ‘Why are you sitting here in the dark? ’ He caught sight of my glass and the smile grew wider. ‘I thought the vodka was looking low …’ He walked over to me and clinked his glass against mine, then sat down at my side, his thigh pressed against my foot. I moved away, put my feet on the floor and started to get up, but he put his hand on my arm.

‘Hey, wait, ’ he said. ‘Don’t run off. I want to talk to you. I wanted to apologize for this afternoon. ’

‘That’s OK, ’ I said. I could feel my face reddening. I didn’t look at him.

‘No, I’m sorry. Those guys were being dickheads. I’m really sorry, OK? ’

I nodded.

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. ’

I cringed, my whole body burned with the shame of it. Some small, stupid part of me had hoped they hadn’t seen, hadn’t realized what it was.

He squeezed my arm, narrowing his eyes as he looked at me. ‘You’ve got a pretty face, Julia, you know that? ’ He laughed. ‘I mean it, you have. ’ He released my arm, slung his own around my shoulders.

‘Where’s Nel? ’ I asked.

‘Sleeping, ’ he said. He sipped his drink and smacked his lips. ‘Think I wore her out. ’ He pulled my body closer to his. ‘Have you ever kissed a guy before, Julia? ’ he asked me. ‘Do you want to kiss me? ’ He turned my face to his and put his lips against mine, I felt his tongue, hot and slimy, pushing into my mouth. I thought I might gag, but I let him do it, just to see what it was like. When I pulled away, he smiled at me. ‘You like that? ’ he asked, hot breath, stale smoke and alcohol in my face. He kissed me again and I kissed him back, trying to feel whatever it was I was supposed to be feeling. His hand slid into the waistband of my pyjama bottoms. I wriggled away, mortified, as I felt his fingers pushing against the fat of my belly, into my knickers.

‘No! ’ I thought I’d cried out, but it was more like a whisper.

‘It’s OK, ’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t mind a bit of blood. ’

He got angry with me afterwards because I wouldn’t stop crying.

‘Oh, come on, it didn’t hurt that much! Don’t cry. Come on, Julia, stop crying. Didn’t you think it was nice? It was good, how it felt, wasn’t it? You were wet enough. Come on, Julia. Have another drink. There you go. Have a sip. Jesus Christ, stop crying! Fuck’s sake. I thought you’d be grateful. ’

Sean

I DROVE HELEN and my father home, but when we got to the front door I was reluctant to cross the threshold. Occasionally strange thoughts take hold of me and I struggle to shake them off. I stood outside the house, my wife and father inside, looking back at me expectantly. I told them to eat without me. I said I needed to go back to the station.

I am a coward. I owe my father more than this. I should be with him today, today of all days. Helen will help him, of course, but even she cannot understand how he will be feeling, the depth of his suffering. And yet I couldn’t sit with him, I couldn’t meet his eye. Somehow, he and I can never look each other in the eye when our minds are on my mother.

I took the car and drove, not to the station but back to the churchyard. My mother was cremated; she isn’t here. My father took her ashes to a ‘special place’. He never told me where exactly, although he did promise that one day he’d take me. We never went. I used to ask about it, but it always upset him, so after a while I let it be.

The church and graveyard were deserted, no one in sight except for old Nickie Sage, hobbling slowly around outside. I left the car, taking the path around the stone wall towards the trees behind the church. When I reached Nickie, she was standing with one hand on the wall, breath whistling in her chest. She turned suddenly. Her face was a florid pink and she was sweating profusely.

‘What do you want? ’ she wheezed. ‘Why are you following me? ’

I smiled. ‘I’m not following you. I spotted you from my car and I just thought I’d come over and say hello. Are you all right? ’

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. ’ She didn’t look fine. She leaned against the wall and looked up at the sky. ‘There’ll be a storm later. ’

I nodded. ‘Smells like it. ’

She jerked her head back. ‘That all done, then? Nel Abbott? Closing the file? Consigning her to history? ’

‘The case isn’t closed, ’ I said.

‘Not yet. Will be soon, though, won’t it? ’ She muttered something else under her breath.

‘What was that? ’

‘It’s all sewn up, isn’t it? ’ She turned to face me full on and prodded me in the chest with a fat forefinger. ‘You know, don’t you, that this wasn’t like the last one? This wasn’t like Katie Whittaker. This was like your mother. ’

I took a step backwards. ‘What is that supposed to mean? ’ I asked her. ‘If you know something, you should tell me. Do you? Do you know something about Nel Abbott’s death? ’

She turned away, muttering again, her words indistinguishable.

My breath quickened, my body flushed with heat. ‘Don’t mention my mother to me like that. Today of all days. Christ! What sort of person does that? ’

She waved a hand at me. ‘Oh, you don’t listen, you lot never listen, ’ she said, and tottered off down the path, still talking as she went, every now and again reaching out to the stone wall to steady herself.

I was angry with her, but more than that, I felt blind-sided, wounded almost. We’d known each other for years and I’d never been anything but polite to her. She was misguided, sure, but I didn’t think of her as a bad person, and I certainly never thought of her as cruel.

I trudged back towards the car before changing my mind and veering off to the village shop. I bought a bottle of Talisker – my father likes it, though he doesn’t drink a great deal. I thought we could share a glass together later, to make up for before, for my leaving like that. I tried to picture it, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table, the bottle between us, raising a glass. I wondered what – who – we would raise it to? The mere imagining of it made me fearful, and my hand started to shake. I opened the bottle.

The smell of the whisky and the heat of the alcohol in my chest brought to mind childhood fevers, fraught dreams, waking with my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, pushing damp hair from my forehead, rubbing Vicks into my chest. There have been times in my life when I have barely thought of her at all, but lately she has been in my thoughts more and more – and more than ever over the past few days. Her face comes to me; sometimes she is smiling, sometimes not. Sometimes she reaches for me.

The summer storm started without me noticing. Perhaps I dropped off. I only know that when I came to, the road ahead looked like a river and thunder seemed to shake the car. I turned the key in the ignition, but then it struck me that the whisky bottle in my lap was only two-thirds full, so I switched the engine off again. Under the drum of thunderous rain I could hear my breathing, and just for a moment I thought I could hear someone else’s breath too. I was struck by the ridiculous notion that if I turned around, there would be someone there, on the back seat of the car. For a moment I was so sure of this that I was too afraid to move.

I decided a walk in the rain would sober me up. I opened the car door, checking the back seat, despite myself, and stepped out. I was instantly soaked through and blinded by water. A fork of lightning split the air and in that second I saw Julia, drenched, half walking, half running towards the bridge. I slid back into the car and flashed the lights on and off. She stopped. I flashed the lights again and, tentatively, she made her way towards me. She stopped a few metres away. I wound down the window and called out to her.

She opened the door and got in. She was still wearing her funeral clothes, though they were sodden now and clinging to her small frame. She’d changed her shoes, though. I noticed that her tights had laddered – I could see a small circle of pale flesh on her knee. It seemed shocking because whenever I’ve seen her before, her body has always been covered – long sleeves and high collars, no skin on show. Unreachable.

‘What are you doing out here? ’ I asked. She glanced down at the whisky in my lap, but made no comment. Instead, she reached over, pulled my face to hers and kissed me. It was strange, heady. I could taste blood on her tongue and for a second I succumbed, before pulling violently away from her.

‘I’m sorry, ’ she said, wiping her lips, her eyes cast down. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve no idea why I did that. ’

‘No, ’ I said. ‘Neither do I. ’ Incongruously, we both started to laugh, nervously at first and then wholeheartedly, as though the kiss were the most hilarious joke in the world. When we stopped, we were both wiping tears from our faces.

‘What are you doing out here, Julia? ’

‘Jules, ’ she said. ‘I was looking for Lena. I’m not sure where she is …’ She looked different to me, no longer closed off. ‘I’m frightened, ’ she said, and she laughed again, as though embarrassed now. ‘I’m really frightened. ’

‘Frightened of what? ’

She cleared her throat and pushed her wet hair back from her face.

‘What are you afraid of? ’

She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t … This sounds strange, I know, but there was a man at the funeral, a man I recognized. He used to be Nel’s boyfriend. ’

‘Oh? ’

‘I mean … not recently. Forever ago. When we were teenagers. I’ve no idea if she’d seen him more recently than that. ’ There were two high spots of colour in her cheeks. ‘She never mentioned him in any of her phone messages. But he was there at the funeral, and I think … I can’t explain why, but I think he might have done something to her. ’

‘Done something? You’re saying you think he might have been involved in her death? ’

She looked at me imploringly. ‘I can’t say that, of course, but you need to look into him, you need to find out where he was when she died. ’

My scalp shrivelled, adrenaline cutting through the alcohol. ‘What’s this man’s name? Who are you talking about? ’

‘Robbie Cannon. ’

I drew a blank for a moment, but then it came to me. ‘Cannon? Local guy? The family had car dealerships, a lot of money. That one? ’

‘Yes. That one. You know him? ’

‘I don’t know him, but I remember him. ’

‘You remember …? ’

‘From school. He was in the year above. Good at sport. Did well with girls. Not very bright. ’

Her head bent so that her chin almost touched her chest, Jules said, ‘I didn’t know you were at school here. ’

‘Yes, ’ I said. ‘I’ve always lived here. You wouldn’t remember me, but I remember you. You and your sister, of course. ’

‘Oh, ’ she said, and her face closed, like a shutter slamming shut. She put her hand on the door handle, as though making to leave.

‘Hang on, ’ I said. ‘What makes you think Cannon did something to your sister? Did he say something, do something? Was he violent towards her? ’

Jules shook her head and looked away. ‘I just know that he’s dangerous. He’s not a good person. And I saw him … looking at Lena. ’

‘Looking at her? ’

‘Yes, looking. ’ She turned her head and met my eye at last. ‘I didn’t like the way he looked at her. ’

‘OK, ’ I said. ‘I’ll, uh … I’ll see what I can find out. ’

‘Thank you. ’

She made to open the car door again, but I put my hand on her arm. ‘I’ll drive you back, ’ I said.

Again, a glance at the bottle, but no word. ‘OK. ’

It took just a couple of minutes to get back to the Mill House and neither of us spoke until Jules had opened the car door. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I wanted to tell her.

‘You’re very like her, you know. ’

She looked shocked and gave a startled, hiccupping laugh.

‘I’m nothing at all like her. ’ She brushed a tear from her cheek. ‘I’m the anti-Nel. ’

‘I don’t think so, ’ I said, but she was already gone.

I don’t remember driving home.

The Drowning Pool

Lauren, 1983

FOR LAUREN’S THIRTY-SECOND birthday, in a week’s time, they would go to Craster. Just her and Sean, because Patrick would be working. ‘It’s my favourite place in all the world, ’ she told her son. ‘There’s a castle, and a beautiful beach, and sometimes you can see seals on the rocks. And after we’ve been to the beach and the castle, we’ll go to the smokehouse and eat kippers on brown bread. Heaven. ’

Sean wrinkled his nose. ‘I think I’d rather go to London, ’ he announced, ‘to see the Tower. And have ice creams. ’

His mother laughed and said, ‘OK then, perhaps we could do that instead. ’

In the end, they didn’t do either.

It was November, the days short and bitter, and Lauren was distracted. She was aware that she was acting differently, but couldn’t seem to stop. She found herself sitting at the breakfast table with her family and all of a sudden her skin would flush, her face would burn, and she would have to turn away to hide it. She turned away when her husband came to kiss her, too – the movement of her head was almost involuntary, beyond her control, so that his lips brushed her cheek, or the corner of her mouth.

Three days before her birthday, there was a storm. It built all day, a vicious wind ripping down the valley, white horses riding the breadth of the pool. At night, the storm broke, the river pushing at its banks, trees felled along its length. The rain came down in sheets, the whole world underwater.

Lauren’s husband and son slept like babies, but Lauren was awake. In the study downstairs, she sat at her husband’s desk, a bottle of his favoured Scotch at her elbow. She drank a glass and tore a sheet of paper from a notebook. She drank another glass, and another, and the page remained blank. She couldn’t even decide on a form of address – ‘dear’ seemed dismissive and ‘dearest’ a lie. With the bottle almost empty and the page still unmarked, she walked out into the storm.

Her blood thick with drink and grief and anger, she made her way to the pool. The village was empty, hatches battened down. Unseen and undisturbed, she clambered and slipped through mud to the cliff. She waited. She waited for someone to come, she prayed that the man she had fallen in love with might miraculously somehow know, might somehow sense her despair and come to save her from herself. But the voice she heard, calling her name in panicked desperation, was not the one she wanted to hear.

And so boldly she stepped up to the precipice and, eyes wide open, pitched herself forward.

There was no way she could have seen him, no way she could have known that her boy was down there, behind the treeline.

No way she could have known that he had been woken by his father’s shouts and the sound of the front door slamming, that he had got up and run downstairs and out into the storm, his feet bare and his skinny limbs covered only by the thinnest cotton.

Sean saw his father climbing into the car and screamed for his mother. Patrick turned, yelling at his son to go back into the house. He ran towards him, grabbing him roughly by the arm and yanking him off his feet, and tried to force him back into the house. But the boy begged, ‘Please, please, don’t leave me here. ’

Patrick relented. He gathered the boy up and carried him to the car, securing him in the back seat, where Sean cowered, terrified and uncomprehending. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. They drove to the river. His father parked the car up on the bridge and said to him, ‘Wait. Wait here. ’ But it was dark and the rain on the roof of the car sounded like bullets and Sean couldn’t escape the feeling that there was someone else in the car with him, he could hear their ragged breathing. So he got out and ran, tripping down the stone steps and falling in the mud on the path, blundering in the darkness and the rain towards the pool.

There was a story, later, at school, that he saw it – he was the boy who watched his mother jump to her death. It wasn’t true. He didn’t see anything. When he got to the pool, his father was already in the water, swimming out. He didn’t know what to do, so he went back and sat under the trees, his back to a stout trunk so that no one could sneak up on him.

It seemed as though he was there for a very long time. Thinking back, he wondered if he might even have fallen asleep, although with the darkness and the noise and the fear, that didn’t seem terribly likely. What he could remember was a woman coming – Jeannie, from the police station. She had a blanket and a torch and she took him back up to the bridge and gave him sweet tea to drink, and they waited there for his father.

Later, Jeannie drove him to her house and made him cheese on toast.

But there was no way Lauren could have known any of that.

Erin

LEAVING THE FUNERAL, I noticed how many people who had attended the service made their way over to say a few words to Sean Townsend’s father, a man I had been introduced to, incredibly briefly, as Patrick Townsend. There was much shaking of hands and doffing of caps, and all the while he stood there like a major general on parade, back straight and lip stiff.

‘Miserable bugger, isn’t he? ’ I said to the uniform standing next to me. The PC turned and looked at me like I had just crawled out from under a rock.

‘Show some respect, ’ he hissed, and turned his back on me.

‘Excuse me? ’ I said, talking to the scruff of his neck.

‘He’s a highly decorated officer, ’ the PC said. ‘And a widower. His wife died here, in this river. ’ He turned again to face me and without a hint of deference to my position he sniffed, ‘So you ought to show some respect. ’

I felt like a fucking idiot. But really, how was I supposed to know that the Sean in Nel Abbott’s story was the Sean in the police station? I didn’t know his parents’ names. Fuck’s sake. Nobody told me, and when I read through Nel Abbott’s work it wasn’t like I was paying that much attention to the details of a suicide that took place more than three decades ago. It didn’t seem overly pressing, under the circumstances.

Seriously: how is anyone supposed to keep track of all the bodies around here? It’s like Midsomer Murders, only with accidents and suicides and grotesque historical misogynistic drownings instead of people falling into the slurry or bashing each other over the head.

I drove back to the city after work – some of the others were going to the pub, but thanks to the Patrick Townsend faux pas I was wearing my outsider status a little more heavily than before. In any event, this case is over, isn’t it? No point hanging around.

I felt relieved, the way you do when you finally figure out what movie you’ve seen an actor in before, when something hazy that’s been bothering you suddenly snaps into focus. The DI’s strangeness – the watery eyes, the shaky hands, his disconnectedness – it all makes sense now. It makes sense if you know his history. His family has suffered almost exactly what Jules and Lena are suffering now – the same horror, the same shock. The same wondering why.

I reread Nel Abbott’s section on Lauren Townsend. It doesn’t tell much of a story. She was an unhappy wife, in love with another man. It talks of her distraction, her absence – maybe she was depressed? In the end, who knows? It’s not like this stuff is gospel, it’s just Nel Abbott’s version of history. It must take a strange sense of entitlement, I would have thought, to take someone else’s tragedy like that and write it as though it belonged to you.

Rereading it, the thing I don’t understand is how Sean could have stayed here. Even if he didn’t see her fall, he was there. What the fuck does that do to you? Still. He would have been small, I suppose. Six or seven? Kids can block it out, trauma like that. But the father? He walks by the river every day, I’ve seen him. Imagine that. Imagine walking past the place where you lost someone, every single day. I can’t credit it, couldn’t do it. But then I suppose I’ve never really lost anyone. How would I know what that kind of grief feels like?

PART TWO

TUESDAY, 18 AUGUST

Louise

LOUISE’S GRIEF WAS like the river: constant and ever-changing. It rippled, flooded, ebbed and flowed, some days cold and dark and deep, some days swift and blinding. Her guilt was liquid, too, it seeped through cracks when she tried to dam it out. She had good days and bad.

Yesterday, she had gone to the church to watch them put Nel in the ground. In reality – and she ought to have known this – they didn’t. Still, she got to watch her slide away to burn, so that was what passed for a good day. Even the outpouring of emotion – she had sobbed throughout the ceremony, despite herself – was cathartic.

But today was going to be a bitch. She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence. The elation she’d felt at first, her vengeful satisfaction, was already waning. And now, with Nel burned to ashes, Louise was left with nothing. Nothing. At no one’s door could she lay her pain and suffering, because Nel was gone. And she worried that in the end the only place she had to bring her torment was home.

Home to her husband and son. So. Today was going to be a bitch, but that bitch had to be faced, stared down. She had made up her mind; it was time to move on. They needed to go before it was too late.

Louise and her husband, Alec, had been arguing about this – the sort of low-level, quiet arguments they had these days – for weeks. Alec felt it would be better to move before the new school term started. They should let Josh start the new school year in a completely new place, he argued, where no one knew who he was. Where he wouldn’t be confronted with his sister’s absence every day.

‘So he’ll never have to talk about her? ’ Louise asked.

‘He’ll talk about her with us, ’ Alec replied.

They’d been standing in the kitchen, their voices strained and hushed. ‘We need to sell this house and start over, ’ Alec said. ‘I know, ’ he said, raising his hands as Louise began to protest. ‘I know this is her home. ’ He faltered then, placing his big hands, mottled with sun damage, on the counter. He hung on as if for dear life. ‘We have to make some kind of new start, Lou, for Josh. If it were just you and me …’

If it were just them, she thought, they’d follow Katie into the water and be done with it. Wouldn’t they? She wasn’t sure Alec would. She used to think that only parents can understand the sort of love that swallows you up, but now she wondered whether it was only mothers who did. Alec felt the grief, of course, but she wasn’t sure he felt the despair. Or the hatred.

So the fault lines were already beginning to show in a marriage she’d thought unshakable. But of course she’d known nothing before. Now, it was obvious: no marriage could survive this loss. It would always sit between them – that neither of them had been able to stop her. Worse, that neither of them had suspected a thing. That the two of them had gone to bed and fallen asleep and discovered her empty bed in the morning and had not for a single second imagined she’d be in the river.

There was no hope for Louise, and little, she thought, for Alec, but Josh was different. Josh would miss his sister every day for the rest of his life, but he could be happy: he would. He would carry her with him, but he would also work, travel, fall in love, live. And the best chance he had was to be away from here, away from Beckford, away from the river. Louise knew that her husband was right about that.

Somewhere inside, she’d known this already, she’d just been reluctant to face it. But yesterday, watching her son after the funeral, she had been gripped by terror. His pinched, anxious face. How easily he startled, flinching at loud noises, cowering like a frightened dog in a crowd. The way he constantly turned his gaze to her, as though he was retreating back into early childhood, no longer an independent twelve-year-old, but a frightened, needy little boy. They had to get him away from here.

And yet. This was where Katie had taken her first steps, spoken her first words, played hide and seek, cartwheeled around the garden, fought with her little brother, soothed him afterwards, laughed and sung and cried and cursed and bled and hugged her mum every day when she got home from school.

But Louise had made up her mind. Like her daughter, she was determined, although the effort was immense. Just to get up from the kitchen table, walk to the bottom of the stairs and then climb them, to place her hand on the door handle, to push down, to enter her room for the last time. Because that’s what it felt like. This was the last time it would be her room. After today, it would be something else.

Louise’s heart was a block of wood; it didn’t beat, it only pained her, scraping against soft tissue, tearing through vein and muscle, flooding her chest with blood.

Good days and bad.

She couldn’t leave the room like this. Hard as it was to think about packing up Katie’s things, putting away her clothes, taking her pictures down from the walls, tidying her away, hiding her from view, it was worse to think of strangers in here. It was worse to imagine what they would touch, how they would look for clues, how they would marvel at how normal everything looked, how normal Katie had looked. Her? Surely not? Surely she can’t be the one who drowned?

So Louise would do it: she would clear the school things from the desk and pick up the pen that once rested in her daughter’s fist. She would fold up the soft grey T-shirt that Katie slept in, she would make her bed. She would take the blue earrings that Katie’s favourite aunt had given her for her fourteenth birthday and tidy them away into her jewellery box. She would take the big, black suitcase from the top of the cupboard in the hallway, she would fill it with Katie’s clothes.

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